Review: There will be Oscars for Spielberg’s excellent Lincoln

Film Review: Lincoln (4 stars)

4 stars

With all the talk of fiscal cliffs and Obamacare, it’s instructive to be reminded what Abraham Lincoln had on his plate as he started his second term. There was war, not overseas but 200 kilometres south of Washington. And there was slavery, an institution that not only kept the South solvent but was seen by many as being personally approved by God. Never mind the Great Emancipator; he should have been called the Miracle Worker.

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is not a biopic per se, since it focuses only on the final few months of the president’s life. Thus we are spared all the folksy, log-cabin-and-rail-splitting history, not to mention the lost years when Lincoln was off hunting vampires.

The story opens in the mud and the blood of a Civil War battlefield. The south was struggling and ready to sue for peace, but Lincoln knew that the best way to abolish slavery would be to pass the 13th Amendment in the North, and then force the Confederacy to accept the new law when it rejoined the Union.

There’s a lot more detail hashed out in the film, but the genius of Tony Kushner (Oscar nominated for Munich) is that we’re never lost in the politics. It all comes down to Lincoln needing to sway a certain number of undecided voters in the House of Representatives.

To this end, he hires — at arm’s length, or with what we would call plausible deniability — a couple of rogue lobbyists played by John Hawkes (The Sessions) and James Spader as a kind of modern (well, modern-ish) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They’re not the only comic relief in the movie — Lincoln provides some of that himself — but they’re the broadest.

Daniel Day-Lewis delivers the goods as Lincoln. With a voice more reedy than stentorian, he nonetheless captures the man’s famed hominess and thoughtful wisdom. An early scene finds him at an official flag-raising, dipping into his stovepipe hat to procure his notes, and then declaring himself finished after about seven words of oratory.

Not that he couldn’t go on when he wanted to. Bruce McGill as Edwin Stanton almost bolts from the room when it seems the president is about to deliver one of his homespun homilies, and Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn) isn’t above calling him out. “Time is a great thickener of things,” says Lincoln, and Seward replies: “Yes, I suppose it is.” Then he pauses and adds: “Actually, I have no idea what you mean.”

Spielberg’s dream team of thespians also includes Jackie Earle Haley as the Confederate vice-president, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Lincoln’s son Robert, and Jared Harris as Ulysses S. Grant.

Special mention must be made of Tommy Lee Jones as the obstreperous Thaddeus Stevens, a Republican bigwig who gets lectured by Lincoln on the proper use of the moral compass, and is later taken down by Mrs. Lincoln (Sally Field, another casting coup) for what she sees as his unhealthy interest in her household budget.

He’s a crusty fellow, bellowing “It opens!” when someone knocks at his door. But he also gets one of the movie’s sweetest, most unexpected scenes, in which the text of the 13thAmendment is read aloud in an oddly intimate setting. And it must be said that “Thaddeus Stevens” is a much better fit for the actor than the good ol’ boy name “Tommy Lee Jones.”

Spielberg is often accused of being too sentimental for his films’ good, but Lincoln manages to keep itself away from undue sanctimony. The president may crave the abolition of slavery, but he’s a realist and a wily politician, setting up situations with regard to peace talks with the “rebs” in which he can misdirect the House without openly lying. Honest Abe indeed!

There’s also very little winking at the future — no one scoffs: “That’ll be the day we have a Negro president!” There is a scene in which Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln, riding in what I can only assume is Horse-Drawn Carriage One, talk about how history will see them. It’s a conversation every First Couple probably has.

Of course, we all know how history went down and what people think of Lincoln today. (He’s among the reasons Americans won’t abolish the penny.) But Spielberg manages to make the House vote a nail-biter, complete with a 19th-century version of the live Tweet, via Morse code.

The only disappointment is that Lincoln doesn’t get the last word in the movie. Kushner, in an interview in Entertainment Weekly, seems to suggest that the president’s casual farewell on the eve of his assassination at one point ended the film. “I suppose it’s time to go,” he says, “though I would rather stay.” Simple and direct, it suits the man whose famed Gettysburg Address was a third as long as this review.